Two Coaches & a Coffee
With nearly 60years of professional experience between them across the world in Premier League, International Rugby, AFL and consulting in a plethora of other sports and industries; two old bulls of the performance, injury prevention, and rehabilitation world: Darren Burgess and Jason Weber catch up over a brew and discuss all things Sports Performance.
Two Coaches & a Coffee
Season 2, Episode 31
What goes through a coach's mind when deciding if an injured player should compete in a high-stakes game? Join us as we explore this critical question with Darren Burgess and Jason Weber, delving into real-life examples like Callum Mills' fitness dilemma and historical cases involving Phil Davis and Stephen May. We'll discuss the fine line between player readiness and long-term health, drawing from our own experiences with grand final fitness tests and the constantly changing weather conditions in Western Australia. Plus, we'll give you an inside look at the excitement surrounding major sporting events like the AFL grand final and the Rugby League preliminary final.
Ever wondered what happens behind the scenes when a top-tier physio leaves for a rival team? Hear about the challenges we face in recruiting and managing sports physiotherapy talent, featuring the departure of Tim Parham. We also tackle the cultural differences in injury management across the globe, from Italy and Spain to the UK and Brazil. Listen as we share surprising stories, like Lucas Leiva's rapid ACL recovery at Grêmio and the varying effectiveness of Creatine Kinase (CK) assessments. This episode is packed with insights on adaptability, context, and the complexities of athlete care and performance.
SpeedSig Intro
Sponsored by SPEEDSIG.com
G'day and welcome to Two Coaches and a Coffee Darren Burgess and Jason Weber. Here we are killing it. We've done this, our second this week. We're playing catch up, darren and I and I will add, we're going for legitimacy this morning because both of us have coffees, which is a change.
Darren Burgess:How are you, mate? I'm all right, mate. It's 8.45 on a beautiful sunny morning, a grand final eve for the AFL here in Australia and preliminary final in the Rugby League.
Jason Weber:It's absolutely pouring here in the desert in Western Australia. Unusual, we don't usually get rain. We're not known for it, yeah there you go.
Darren Burgess:I won the Callum Mills.
Jason Weber:The call on Callum Mills. Absolutely, man, I think, yeah, man, you were spot on. One of the interesting things was and a thing I probably didn't know or didn't remember was that Callum was pulled out. And again, this is not about Callum Mills or the Swans per se, but his history is he had a similar injury and was played in a grand final in 2016 and didn't go very well, so it's not the yeah.
Jason Weber:So it's not the first time. So I applaud the coaches and I think Swan's management came out early. They made a good call early, Nothing worse. The one I hate is when you try and drag a player all the way to the 10 minutes before the game. The guy who's actually going to play doesn't get to prepare. Yeah, yeah, the kid thinks he's going to get dragged through. They told him on what it was Wednesday.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, a couple of things on that one.
Darren Burgess:I heard Phil Davis who, for people I've, seen a very well-experienced and outstanding player and a person retired now, but he's a centre-back in soccer parlay but a full-back in AFL. He came out and said and I think it was 2018, maybe that he was doing a fitness test in the warm-up on the day of the grand final and he was separate from the team and he just said he felt that was a big mistake. He said he felt it at the time and he was hoping like he said he had his time again that he would have said no, this is not right. He knew he wasn't right, but he got through the prelim with that injury. The other I got one for that. Well, the other thing about Mills Mills he got through training 100% and comes off. You tell him, you know, the media ask him. So, yeah, I got through 100%. The media ask the coach I got through 100%. So it would have been a tough decision.
Darren Burgess:The final one on that before I let you off the leash only three years ago in the grand final, we had Stephen May who had a you know, grade two hammy, a six to eight week injury, and we turned him around in two weeks. But there was no at no stage in that process and this is not you know. This is just how we did it at the time. It was great because it was COVID, so we were very isolated into our own little hotel and you didn't know what was going on around you or anything like that. At no state was there any doubt that he was going to play and we just set out the plan. And if he hit all of those things, it wasn't even a decision to make At some point in those hurdles. If he hadn't made one of those, he was out. But he just kept ticking them off and just kept ticking them off.
Jason Weber:Mate, can I start backwards and go forwards, which is always the way I'll go? Mate, I think your Stephen May management speaks to really well-managed, holistic approach, because when you go radiology and we go, oh, it's a grade two, it's six to eight weeks, so you're putting a definition on. You had a plan, you had steps and he could have failed at any point in that and you would have gone. Oh well, we try, we did our very best. That was it.
Darren Burgess:But we did a great thing about that is um he. I don't want to see the scan results.
Jason Weber:No, but again I think you've managed. Like the absoluteness of radiology sometimes is incorrect. I think the idea that we can grade, say, two, therefore it is six-week injury, is not always spot on. So, man, I applaud the management from your end, I think that's Outstanding team of doctors and physios.
Jason Weber:Yeah, and again, before we get on to our other topic of fucking physios, I think you've got to look at that exact thing. I think your physio team, your medic, your docs, everything well, outstanding. So I think that's a great call and a great one for people to understand. The docs, everything was outstanding. So I think that's a great call and a great one for people to understand. But I will say grand final test, grand final 2013,. I did a fitness test in the warm-up with a player who had a torn calf and he ended up playing. But he tore his calf up so bad it became a 12-week injury after the game, but he got through and he was managed.
Jason Weber:Yeah, but he was some tricky management from the medical team. Again, I applaud the medical team I worked with. They were awesome, they did a magnificent job, but it was a big cost. You could only have done it once. They pulled the trigger once and got it through Grand final what are you doing? But he was in the warm-up. I mean, I was, I pushed him, I flogged him in the warm-up because I was going to say like you're either going to survive this and we're going to go or I'm not having a half decision here. And he A the athlete, was super brave and gave it everything. I think the coaches made good decisions. They were like hawks and were watching it and I think the medical team were just outstanding. The physios, the docs were just outstanding. So I mean but I will say I have another final story Similar thing, defender.
Jason Weber:So similar to the defender we just described Going into finals. So finals are now two weeks away. This was two years ago. Player has what's classified as a grade two plus injury on scan.
Jason Weber:The management team medical strength, you strength, conditioning, performance, the whole thing did exactly what you did stepped him through his. This is what we're going to do, and every step of the way, if he fails one thing, he's out. One of the beauties was he got to on the field and again, gratuitous publication. But I don't care. They used SpeedSig in the back end and because they had pre-data, it was just one more step and that's what it should be. He went, got range of motion, got strength, got function, got on the field, got speed. But you're also doing the speed the way you used to do it. You haven't changed. Bang.
Jason Weber:The kid ended up playing two finals at I think it was three weeks. They got him through in 21 days when he should have been. They were calling five to six and in that case the doctor had gone to the coach and said oh, we're all done. This kid can't play, he's out, he's out, he's out. And I'm like fuck man, what are you doing? Whereas, like you described, good management of the athlete's mind, the body, the team are together. Anyway, yeah, both good examples of great management. There I would say radiology is one piece of it. Don't get sucked into. You know the absoluteness of it all. Don't get sucked into the absoluteness of it all the time.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, I guess the other thing a player is not a player is not a player. And I'm not talking about their mental makeup. They're all equal, just some are more equal than others If it was, I don't know I Christian Salem running off the halfback or a right winger in soccer. Yes, yeah and a back. So you know, we had fortunately played Western Bulldogs four times in that season and the most Masey had sprinted was 23 metres.
Darren Burgess:So, you know, and he's a smart senior player and could self-manage, and you know, there's no doubt that he re-injured it at the time during the game. So you could say, you know, did you get away with it, didn't you? But he re-injured it, or he pulled up short in the second quarter when we were losing. We ended up winning comfortably, but, yeah, he managed himself really well and we threw as much data at it as we possibly could. But ultimately, as I said to you earlier this week, I think it was a smart decision by Swans not to play him in a different position, different player, different history.
Jason Weber:Oh, I agree, I agree, but I think the holistic approach is fantastic, which I guess leads us into I know I intimated before the fucking physio thing that's. I'm just being, I'm just being uh supercilious with that like, um, physios are awesome, parts of our mechanism and I think in australia, I will say and I'm probably uk would be my limited experience there, but you'd know our, our level of capability with physios is far greater and I say this with caution than the us with, um, some athletic trainers I've seen they just don't have the same skill set and I think everyone would acknowledge that that they're not. They're educated very, very differently. I had a conversation the other day with an AT in the US who really didn't understand the anatomy of an injury that we were talking about and therefore then discussing in a collective way with the rest of the staff how you might treat that athlete. They didn't really understand, which I found to be remarkable.
Jason Weber:So I think we're very lucky that the good physios there's good and bad of everything, right? Well, look Like Jerry Seinfeld says, you can't have the best doctor. Some doctors only pass by 1%. You're going to have the doctor that only just got through. So, anyway, what have you got for me on the fucking physios thing mate.
Darren Burgess:Well, I'm not going to, you know, no, no of course no, no, no.
Darren Burgess:I've just lost a very good physio, tim Parham, who I've been working with for many years, both in the AFL and in the Premier League, and he's moved to Port Adelaide, who's our arch rival. So it's, you know, a Liverpool physio going to Everton or you know an Arsenal physio going to Tottenham, or something like that. And they poached him, and fair play to them. They went about it the right way and did the job, and it's a slightly different role for him. He's more on the performance side. I'm not quite sure of the details, but it's a better role, better pay and good luck to him. So now I'm recruiting. Well, there you go, you just publicly put it out there.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, rehab physio. So yeah, we're slightly restructuring the department At this stage. Anyway, we're slightly restructuring the department so we'll see where it lands, but the ad will go up shortly. So that's four positions that I've had to advertise this year. So externally people are probably thinking, wow, they're all abandoning Virgo, they've all gone on to bigger and better jobs.
Jason Weber:But they've aren't, mate. I think we've talked about that before. We've talked about that before. I think if you've got people going upwards to other jobs, I think that's a massive, a massive kudos to your program and to your leadership. That, um, you know those guys are going on with it.
Jason Weber:But I would say any staff at the last minute, given that you've had quite a few anyone telling you the last minute you're gonna say, oh, fucking snc coaches, what? Because it's just the hassle of it, like just finding, finding a new person, particularly a good one. Like I've got a guy for you. Man, I've got an athlete of mine in Italy at the moment we're managing a hamstring and he's working with the physios in Italy and he had so they don't scan the thing, they've done an ultrasound. They sent me the ultrasound and I'm like man, you can't they looked at contractile quality like under man, you can't, they looked at contractile quality Under ultrasound. You can see the muscle contracting and so that's fine and I said, well, that's good, at least we can see that when you see an ultrasound of muscle that's ruptured, it looks disgraceful but nonetheless you can't see. Was there any other damage that we need to be aware of my fascial or anything like that. So anyway they say, oh look, he's all fine on ultrasound.
Jason Weber:I'm like, hang on, he's not because clinically I asked the kid to do certain tests and he failed anyway. So the physios are there, are pushing him through these ridiculous runs, like five-minute efforts, like continuous early in the rear, and I'm like what the fuck? Anyway he's re-injured, so he's still. He would only have been a 1B, like low-level stuff, but maybe 1A. But now he's gone, he's torn again, he's injured again at day nine. And I'm like what they're doing is not even related to any semblance of what we would call conventional management of a hamstring injury. There's no progressions in speed, there's no quantification of running capability. I just feel for the kid. The kid's fought this kid actually fought through cancer and he's got himself recruited into Italy. He plays on an Italian passport, australian guy but has an Italian passport through family. And I just feel for the kid mate. I feel for athletes who have pushed so hard and then they get and it's not just a physio thing. They could have been a dunce S&C coach, but they're just off the charts, it's interesting.
Darren Burgess:There are obviously different ways to do things and clearly this is not a. It's not the ideal way. Yeah, but I've seen Spanish players who have done something to their soleus and calf and literally not do anything but manual therapy with a Spanish physio for 10 days and then say, tranquilo, I'll be right, I'll be right, I'll be okay. Then on the Friday, run around in a captain's run and play in a massive game on the Saturday and get through. And all the while I'm thinking, no, there's no progression here. He literally did not set foot on the training ground for 10 days. And then on the Friday coach says no, I'm picking him because he was an important player, Get through.
Jason Weber:Rapido, rapido.
Darren Burgess:Yeah, just you know, I'm like mate, we need to get you out there, we need to go Monday. Just you know, I'm like mate, we need to get you out there, we need to go.
Jason Weber:Monday, wednesday, friday, and he's just like calm down. So, man out of interest, out of interest in that circumstance, given what you were doing at the time, did you see scans? Did you like, did you get MR he?
Darren Burgess:said no, I'm not scanning it Right, but objective measures by the and and.
Darren Burgess:The way australians and the uk physios and medical people operate is quite similar yes, very and so their assessment was yeah, it looks like a grade one, soleus, maybe grade two, you know. Yep, there's no way he can. He can train for the next sort of six to seven days, um, but because sp player, we had a Portuguese physio. They managed it, managed it conservatively and clearly did a good job, but he literally did not set foot on the field till the day before.
Jason Weber:Yeah, wow.
Darren Burgess:Came at Old Trafford and did some.
Darren Burgess:And no issues after no, no issues. It was fine. And so you know, we say, oh well, it needs to be at 60% and 70% and 80% and 90%, which is obviously, you know, makes sense. But, by the same token, I spent a fair bit of time in Brazil in 2011-12 with Lucas Leiva, a Brazilian midfielder. Went over to his home club of Grêmio, spent a fair bit of time with them, watching them rehab. His ACL was playing six months to the day, doing things there within a month of injury. That I would never do with an ACL. This was 12 years ago and, yep, played no issue Six months to the day. He's playing, no dramas, and so completely different rehab process than what we would do. And fine, no problem.
Jason Weber:When you say he was doing stuff ACL-wise that you wouldn't have done like. Just give me a quick example.
Darren Burgess:So, using a lot of dynamic stability work, whether that was BOSU ball, tightrope walking, assessing every week from week one of the injury on an IKD every week, injured and non-injured and that was the whole way they went through the whole process. Was IKD from week one? No, that would have been sorry. Week three, Week three of injury, it would have been.
Jason Weber:Darren, we're on a podcast man. Can you quickly let the putters know what IKD is, please?
Darren Burgess:Isokinetic dynamometry, dynamometry, so yeah.
Jason Weber:So were they training on the IKD as well as like so?
Darren Burgess:not just doing one set they were training on it. Yep, yeah, yeah, it's interesting Literally and I'm just like what are you doing to my you know 40 million pound asset? But I just had to trust that not everybody does it like we do and honestly, we're doing a whole bunch of stuff that would be physios in Australia and England and probably elsewhere would be looking at and strength and conditioning coaches and be going no, this is not right.
Jason Weber:Yeah, but I think you, mate, you're very lucky to have been exposed to that stuff. I mean, I would say the last ACI I did, which was just the back end of COVID, and I did it from start to finish by myself, so there was no weirdly no medical interventions at all. I did most of the treatment and stuff, which is probably frowned upon, but fuck that. But I did things in that process that I had not done before, mainly because again, gratuitous plug because I was measuring speed and how the kid was running. We actually slowed down at certain parts where I would have gone ahead, and that was my main thing.
Jason Weber:I spent more time on achieving some baseline and I would say interestingly, given your comment about how much balance it in the biggest issue we faced, without question, was lateral hip control. The knee was fine. The knee did really well, but his, his glute med and his lateral pelvis control was was terrible, and it remains to this day to be challenged on that side. Um, and so I wonder, mate, mate, you know you look at cultures like South American, european, particularly ones that don't speak English. I'd love to see what they're doing and, more importantly, ask them why, where possible. Not that they listen to my stupid Australian accent, but like I, I mean this group.
Darren Burgess:So this club had 40-odd players who were playing three games a week regularly. The dressing room looked like a, the training ground looked like a VFL, afl, you know, division III training ground For US.
Jason Weber:That's sport in the park, Like if you're playing.
Darren Burgess:And yet they were constantly winning the league and they were. The one thing that was really interesting was and this again, 12, 13 years ago, they were doing Creighton Kine's assessments on 72 hours post-game. Yeah, no, in fact, 48 hours post-game.
Jason Weber:Yeah.
Darren Burgess:And I said to the player you mean 48 hours like post-game? He said I mean 48 hours on the dot and I said no, no, surely not Sure enough. We drove down to the training ground at 10 pm, 48 hours post a game. Wow, every player who played comes through, gets a CK and then drives off. So they were there for 30 seconds at 10 pm and I wouldn't have seen it with my own eyes. And the physiologist has taken the CK. So you know we might look at an interesting. I've got Barry Dross to do a pretty thorough review of CK and we sort of came up with the fact that it probably wasn't showing us what we needed it to show us. So we stopped taking it at Liverpool after that. But then suddenly there was probably people have sent me 10 different articles in different languages on CK that came up with a different result. So who knows?
Jason Weber:Well, mate, I did CK. Yeah, I was doing CKs, you know, routinely back in those days as well, and I think the level of study required to figure out where it's applicable, like you get some signals that you think this is bang on and then other stuff that was so far off, so, yeah, it ended up again like we've spoken about before, it's no good if you're exploring it and you go, hey, we think this is the bomb, and you go to the coach and the coach is going what's this shit? Like you know, it's just difficult.
Darren Burgess:Well, it points to the discussion and we're getting, I guess, close to the end of the time, but the discussion we've had a little while ago, and even the discussion we had earlier in this week in this outstanding two-day per two-.
Darren Burgess:Two podcasts per week, bumper week of two coaches. If you are taking the information and you do your own internal validity, reliability and you find that it's useless, don't take it. And the best example and everybody there would be I reckon 90% of people who are of did a pretty thorough analysis of subjective data and found it was useless. So just stop taking it. And you know, everybody else who put in research out about it were like oh no, no, but it's so good. It's so good. Yeah, it's great with uni students who are forced to respond to pass a course. You know, I'm not sure it's great with $50 million athletes who could not care, who are going to get picked anyway.
Jason Weber:Yeah.
Darren Burgess:So just do your own. You know internal validity and reliability, whether it's CK, ikd, subjective jump testing, all this stuff that we think is the Bible, yeah.
Jason Weber:But the big mate, I couldn't more. I mean, I'm a I'm not a massive supporter of subjective. I've been there, done that and I think it's fallen over. But, um, the really hard thing is because I did a, a big study internally, uh, 2016, 17, looking at calf injuries, but you can't to get the number of positives. So, like we did this stuff he broke, he didn't break. It's so challenging. You need so much data. So it is, our environment is very, very tough to try and get genuine, like even validity-wise, like you can only validate against a guy who gets absolutely injured and then to say, hey, we didn't proceed to training because of this decision. You then need to be examining the decisions.
Darren Burgess:So what decision?
Jason Weber:did you make? And like it's like who's got time and space to do all those things? So when we yeah, exactly how did we stop an injury? Like my great decision to do X prevented a hamstring injury, well, how the hell do you know that unless and then? He got a better leg, yeah, but unless you're validating, unless you're recording the decision that was made and examining the decisions, you're not. You know it's insane, insane, insane.
Darren Burgess:Because when I got to Liverpool, we had the resources to employ some pretty cool statisticians and we employed a company who were doing some market simulations and I've probably spoken about this before but because we didn't have enough injuries to actually, you know, Did you bootstrap your injuries, Darren. We used Monte Carlo simulations.
Jason Weber:Yeah.
Darren Burgess:And we had a computer running for four days straight to use that bootstrap technique to just say, okay, based on these soft tissue injuries, let's try and recreate the same environment, but a thousand times more. And you know, did it work? Who knows? But that's what you have to do. You have to create fake injuries and fake data.
Jason Weber:So, just quickly, when you create synthetic data like that, the idea of Monte Carlo simulations and bootlegging for the non-nerds is you're taking a sample of data and you're basically recreating more data that has a similar distribution and a similar let's just call it pattern to what you've already got.
Jason Weber:So you're creating more samples such that you can create a bigger experiment. Now it's a widely used technique in statistics and, given that I've stepped off into the world of nerd Jedis, yeah, it's very, very effective. But I'm going to put back onto our environment and say that for Darren to have the resources great, he went and got those people, but I think your sports science staff probably need to be down the path of understanding that. So you know again, I'm going to hang it on sports science if you're doing just Excel and you're doing GPS data, you've got to be doing more than that. You've got to be able to. If you're going to be able to work for a bloke like Darren, you're going to need to know that stuff, and you might not necessarily need to be the guy that actually does it, but certainly understand it. There you go. That's my pitch for the day.
Darren Burgess:Right, appreciate that's my pitch for the day. Right, appreciate it, mate, but at the moment we're very happy with brains in that space. Oh, but brains. So there you go.
Jason Weber:There's a dude who would answer that question without challenge without a concern.
Darren Burgess:We're more interested in physios at the moment, so you know how to contact me.
Jason Weber:I went through an ACL mate. Can I come work for you? Yeah, no problem, we could sit and have coffee and discuss bits and pieces anyway.
Darren Burgess:Look, mate, it's a good week.
Jason Weber:We've knocked it out of the park two in a row, mate, I'll be honest and say, like we've got the 10 listeners we've got, I'm trying to break a record this month of people downloading, so we're looking for 11, 11 downloads this month. I've had some people.
Darren Burgess:Spoken to some people recently who say you know good podcasts. So those people can you please tell them If we can get?
Jason Weber:11 or 12 this month, it'd be awesome. Trying to break a record, it's just to make me feel good, right that we'd get a dopamine hit of hey, we're doing great, so we'll get 12 downloads. Anyway, it's been a pleasure, as always, mate. Let's see what happens in the grand final in AFL. What's your prediction, mate?
Darren Burgess:I think Sydney have been the best team all year. I think Sydney have been the best team all year.
Jason Weber:I think Sydney will get it. The only thing is if the Lions can find something emotional late, which is what they've done the last couple of games. But if they get guys light up like Cam Rainer and that light up Cam Rainer's like for people overseas he's sort of like a running back who plays in AFL. He's not the normal. He's a powerful, stocky but beautiful kick when he gets going, plays forward. So who knows? But I would agree Sydney have got so much firepower across the board.
Darren Burgess:You're hard to back against them. We're on the same tip.
Jason Weber:All right, mate. All right. Thank you, mate. We'll speak to you and everybody else. You have a cracking weekend. Remember, get those 12 downloads for us.